This is a symposium about –alities. Now commonplace, terms like temporality, governmentality, positionality, and so on have made their way into literary studies and the humanities more broadly. The broadening of scholarship beyond the human now underway requires that we take a fresh look at the poetics and politics of interpretation, whether or not our scholarship studies the nonhuman explicitly. At the precise moment at which we are being told to look “outside,” we need to get clear again: what is this outside? Is it thinkable? Can we say what we have been saying in such a climate?

We are seeking essays for an edited collection titled Rethinking Globalization and Spatial Scale. The goal of the volume is to bring together interdisciplinary research on globalization spanning the humanities and social sciences that foregrounds theoretical and methodological conceptualizations of scale—how people, capital, goods, material infrastructure, ideas, and power aggregate along or slide among different degrees or levels of attachment, from personal to local to national to transnational.